Als im Jahr 1992 die Frage aufgeworfen wurde, ob der französische Philosoph Jacques Derrida den Ehrendoktortitel der University of Cambridge verliehen bekommen sollte, lehnte ein Teil der Jury-Mitglieder die Vergabe ab. Man könne nicht, so hieß es damals, einen Denker würdigen, der in seinen Schriften vormalig Gedankenspiele inszeniere und »überall seine eigenen Urteile wieder umstößt«. Die zuletzt zitierten Worte wurden so nicht geäußert, da sie aus dem dritten Jahrhundert von dem griechischen Philosophen Porphyrius stammten und gegen den 〉theoretischen Gründungsvater〈 des (...) Christentums, Paulus, gerichtet waren. Porphyrius war in seiner Kritik an Paulus nicht weniger kleinlich als die oben erwähnten Jurymitglieder. Es sei die Inkohärenz eines Denkens, das er bei Paulus kritisiere und das »jeder Bildung entbehre«. Denn »beinahe wie ein Schwert wetzt er [Paulus] seine Zunge und zerstückelt ohne Schonung die Glieder des Gesetzes, er, der an vielen Stellen den Gehorsam gegen das Gesetz eingeschärft und das Leben nach demselben für lobenswert erklärt hat.«. (shrink)

Fantasies have the power in the very midst of political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, to suppress internal antagonisms in times of crisis. More specifcally, they help blur aporias of a community's ideological structures by invoking a common sense that reconstitutes the community, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the.

Fantasies have the power in the very midst of political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, to suppress internal antagonisms in times of crises. More specifically, they help to blur aporias of a community’s ideological structures by invoking a common sense that reconstitutes the community, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the “space of reasons” is analyzed in this article because fantasies, and specifically excessive and radical fantasies, suspend the game of giving and asking for reasons. They (...) do so in order to ground premises of contestation in the background of communal reason via an emotional and secret “code” of what it means to be a “we.” Totalitarian, monarchical, and democratic societies need this “code” to purge society of the pure formalities of political reason, or, in other words: to get rid of fantasy fatigue. (shrink)

Several debates of the last years within the research field of contemporary realism – known under titles such as "New Realism," "Continental Realism," or "Speculative Materialism" – have shown that science is not systematically the ultimate measure of truth and reality. This does not mean that we should abandon the notions of truth or objectivity all together, as has been posited repeatedly within certain currents of twentieth century philosophy. However, within the research field of contemporary realism, the concept of objectivity (...) itself has not been adequately refined. What is objective is supposed to be true outside a subject’s biases, interpretations and opinions, having truth conditions that are met by the way the world is. The volume combines articles of internationally outstanding authors who have published on either Idealism, Epistemic Relativism, or Realism and often locate themselves within one of these divergent schools of thought. As such, the volume focuses on these traditions with the aim of clarifying what the concept objectivity nowadays stands for within contemporary ontology and epistemology beyond the analytic-continental divide. With articles from: Jocelyn Benoist, Ray Brassier, G. Anthony Bruno, Dominik Finkelde, Markus Gabriel, Deborah Goldgaber, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Johannes Hübner, Andrea Kern, Anton F. Koch, Martin Kusch, Paul M. Livingston, Paul Redding, Sebastian Rödl, Dieter Sturma. (shrink)

"'Der heute vorherrschende Begriff von Subjektivität beruht auf dem Habermas'schen Projekt gegenseitiger Anerkennung von frei und verantwortlich handelnden Akteuren. Was diesem Projekt entgeht, ist das antagonistische Herzstück von Subjektivität: die traumatische Verstörung, die in den Begriff des Subjekts selbst -- von Kant bis Hegel -- eingeschrieben ist. Mit Bezug auf Lacan erinnert uns Finkelde kraftvoll an diese vernachlässigte Dimension: die wahre Bedeutung von exzessiver Subjektivität liegt darin, dass Subjektivität als solche exzessiv ist. Das Buch Exzessive Subjektivität ist nicht bloß (...) ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Subjektphilosophie, es ist viel mehr: es bestimmt das Themenfeld gänzlich neu. Kurz gesagt, es ist bereits jetzt ein Klassiker' (Slavoj Žižek)" --Back cover. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan comments repeatedly on anamorphic art as it exemplifies for him how the mind from a certain angle perceives through law-like patterns the world that would otherwise be nothing but a chaos of arbitrary multiplicities. The angle, though, has a certain effect on what is perceived; an effect that, as such, cannot be perceived within the realm of experience. The article tries to make the link between diffraction laws of perception more explicit in the subject-object dichotomy and refers for (...) that purpose to the work of both Hegel and Lacan. A reference to Hegel is necessary, as Hegel was not only one of Lacan’s own most important sources of insights, but the author who first focused on justified true belief through a theory of a missed encounter between truth and knowledge. (shrink)

How can a set throw itself into itself and remain a set and an element of itself at the same time? This is obviously impossible, as Bertrand Russell has prominently shown. One simply cannot pic a trash-can up and throw it into itself. Now, Hegel, Benjamin, and Badiou take a different position on the subject when they refer time and time again to "concrete universality" as an oxymoronic structure that touches ontologically upon their theoretical philosophies as well as their practical (...) philosophies. The article tries to show how both philosophers affirm the mentioned paradox as central for the understanding of Dialectical Materialism in its classical as well as in its contemporary understanding. (shrink)

Badiou and Wittgenstein focus in their works on potentialities of innovation in the realm of thought as well as in the realm of politics. These innovations manifest themselves especially when two seemingly contrasting jurisdictions of thought – present in politics and logic – meet and merge. For Badiou a set-theoretical process of enforcement may change pre-established templates of a political doxa. For Wittgen-stein it is the spontaneity of concept-formation that crisscross referential relations within the “space of reason” and through performative (...) enactments makes visible unexpected places of unprompted innovation. For both Wittgenstein and Badiou, the subject is of vital importance in this union of politics and logic. It is both a “limit of the world” as well as a “supernumerary agency”. Characterized as such, it can provoke new worlds to appear with the aid of what I will call in the following paragraphs self-proclaimed logics of scission. (shrink)

Badiou and Wittgenstein focus in their works on potentialities of innovation in the realm of thought as well as in the realm of politics. These innovations manifest themselves especially when two seemingly contrasting jurisdictions of thought—present in politics and logic—meet and merge. For Badiou a set-theoretical process of enforcement may change pre-established templates of a political doxa. For Wittgenstein it is the spontaneity of concept-formations that crisscross referential relations within the “space of reasons” and through performative enactments make visible unexpected (...) places of unprompted innovation. For both Wittgenstein and Badiou, the subject is of vital importance in this union of politics and logic. It is both a “limit of the world” as well as a “supernumerary agency.” Characterized as such, it can provoke new worlds to appear with the aid of what I will call self-proclaimed logics of scission. (shrink)

Parallax, or the change in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and more precisely, the assumption that this adjustment is not only due to a change of focus, but a change in that object's ontological status has been a key philosophical concept throughout history. Building upon Slavoj Žižek's The Parallax View, this volume shows how parallax is used as a figure of thought that proves how the incompatibility between the physical and the theoretical touches (...) not only upon the ontological, but also politics and aesthetics. With articles written by internationally renowned philosophers such as Frank Ruda, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston and Zizek himself, this book shows how modes of parallax remain in numerous modern theoretical disciplines, such as the Marxian parallax in the critique of political economy and politics; and the Hegelian parallax in the concept of the work of art, while also being important to debates surrounding speculative realism and dialectical materialism. Spanning philosophy, parallax is then a rich and fruitful concept that can illuminate the studies of those working in epistemology, ontology, German Idealism, political philosophy and critical theory. (shrink)

Das neue Jahrbuch Praktische Philosophie in globaler Perspektive ist ein Forum fur Arbeiten aus den Bereichen der Politischen Philosophie, der Moral-, Sozial- und Rechtsphilosophie sowie aus den Nachbardisziplinen, die sich dezidiert mit globalen Fragen befassen oder an entsprechende Problemstellungen anschliessen. Band 1 hat den Schwerpunktteil: Pragmatistische Impulse. Der philosophische Pragmatismus erfreut sich seit einiger Zeit grosserer Aufmerksamkeit. Es ist eine Vielzahl an pragmatistischen Forschungsfeldern entstanden, die so gut wie jede philosophische Subdisziplin tangieren. Fur diesen Band wurden vorrangig Arbeiten ausgewahlt, die (...) dezidiert den Mehrwert des Pragmatismus fur Fragen der Praktischen Philosophie untersuchen. (shrink)

Als im Jahr 1992 die Frage aufgeworfen wurde, ob der französische Philosoph Jacques Derrida den Ehrendoktortitel der University of Cambridge verliehen bekommen sollte, lehnte ein Teil der Jury-Mitglieder die Vergabe ab. Man könne nicht, so hieß es damals, einen Denker würdigen, der in seinen Schriften vormalig Gedankenspiele inszeniere und »überall seine eigenen Urteile wieder umstößt«. Die zuletzt zitierten Worte wurden so nicht geäußert, da sie aus dem dritten Jahrhundert von dem griechischen Philosophen Porphyrius stammten und gegen den 〉theoretischen Gründungsvater〈 des (...) Christentums, Paulus, gerichtet waren. Porphyrius war in seiner Kritik an Paulus nicht weniger kleinlich als die oben erwähnten Jurymitglieder. Es sei die Inkohärenz eines Denkens, das er bei Paulus kritisiere und das »jeder Bildung entbehre«. Denn »beinahe wie ein Schwert wetzt er [Paulus] seine Zunge und zerstückelt ohne Schonung die Glieder des Gesetzes, er, der an vielen Stellen den Gehorsam gegen das Gesetz eingeschärft und das Leben nach demselben für lobenswert erklärt hat.«. (shrink)

Many have claimed that epistemic rationality sometimes requires us to have imprecise credal states (i.e. credal states representable only by sets of credence functions) rather than precise ones (i.e. credal states representable by single credence functions). Some writers have recently argued that this claim conflicts with accuracy-centered epistemology, i.e., the project of justifying epistemic norms by appealing solely to the overall accuracy of the doxastic states they recommend. But these arguments are far from decisive. In this essay, we prove some (...) new results, which show that there is little hope for reconciling the rationality of credal imprecision with accuracy-centered epistemology. (shrink)

This paper addresses the ongoing debate over the relation between belief and credence. A proposal is made to reverse the currently predominant order of analysis, by taking belief as conceptually basic and credence as the phenomenon to be clarified. In brief, the proposal is to explicate an agent’s credence in a proposition P as the agent’s tendency toward believing P. Platitudinous as this reduction may seem, it runs counter to all of the major positions in the debate, including the Threshold (...) View, the Certainty View as conventionally understood, Dualism, Eliminativism, as well as Credence Primitivism. Section 1 gives an overview on the current state of the debate. Section 2 considers unsuccessful predecessors of the proposed belief-first approach to credence. Section 3 motivates and lays out the basics of a conceptual framework for thinking about doxastic states that characterizes such states in terms of two formally independent dimensions, one pertaining to the agent’s tendency toward believing P, the other to the level of resilience with which the agent manifests that tendency. Against this backdrop, it is argued in Sect. 4 that the present reduction satisfies a set of standard, theoretically neutral criteria of adequacy for theories of credence, at least once they are purged of a quite common conflation of tendency and resilience. Section 5 argues against all of the above competing accounts. (shrink)

Student relativism is a widespread phenomenon in philosophy classes. While the exact nature of student relativism is controversially discussed, many authors agree on two points: First, it is widely agreed that SR is a rather problematic phenomenon, because it potentially undermines the very purpose of doing philosophy—if there is no objective truth, arguing seems to be pointless. Second, it is widely agreed that there will be some close connection between SR and a tolerant attitude towards conflicting opinions. In this paper, (...) I will argue that if these two assumptions are true, then discussing some basic philosophical insights about the concept of tolerance with students will be a promising new strategy of dealing with SR. (shrink)

This study illuminates how a cross-sector social partnership legitimizes itself toward multiple internal and external stakeholders. Within a single-case study design, we collected retrospective and real time data on the partnership between Deutsche Post DHL and The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Within this partnership, Deutsche Post DHL provides corporate volunteers that support disaster response after natural disasters on a pro bono basis. The main objects that needed legitimacy as well as the audiences from which legitimacy (...) was mainly sought changed over time. In addition, we identified legitimation work as occurring across objects, audiences, and time. Thus, we introduce legitimation work as the purposeful effort of the legitimacy seeker to avoid certain issues while ensuring other issues that are of importance to the conferrer of legitimacy. These findings contribute to micro-level considerations within institutional theory which view legitimacy as socially constructed between legitimacy seeker and conferrer. Hence, we add another perspective on legitimation to the previously existing conceptualizations of legitimacy as a deterministic consequence of institutionalization. (shrink)

This paper discusses a scenario borrowed from Williamson (2000) and repurposes it to argue for the possibility of conflict between two prima facie categorical norms of epistemic rationality: the norm to respect one’s evidence and the norm to be coherent. It is argued, pace Williamson, that in the conflict defining the scenario, the evidence norm overrides the coherence norm; that a rational agent with our evidence would lack evidence about some of their own credences; and that for agents whose evidence (...) is limited in this way, incoherence fails to entail irrationality. The above possibility claim has also been defended by Worsnip (2018), albeit on a quite different premise set and in conjunction with a coherence-centered account of epistemic rationality that issues predictions incompatible with those licensed by the evidence-centered account recommended here, as illustrated towards the end of the paper. (shrink)

Consider where κ is an uncountable regular cardinal. By a result of Shelah's we have for almost all witnessing this. Here we consider the question if there could be a similar result for. We will discuss some basic facts implying that this cannot hold in general. We will use these facts to construct an interesting example of a pseudo Prikry forcing, answering a question of Sinapova.

In the past several years, observational entropy has been developed as both a quantum generalization of Boltzmann entropy, and as a rather general framework to encompass classical and quantum equilibrium and non-equilibrium coarse-grained entropy. In this paper we review the construction, interpretation, most important properties, and some applications of this framework. The treatment is self-contained and relatively pedagogical, aimed at a broad class of researchers.

Dass das Verständnis von und die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit argumentativen Zusammenhängen für den Philosophie- und Ethikunterricht von besonderer Bedeutung ist, ist unumstritten. Ebenso unumstritten ist es, dass es sich bei der schulischen Vermittlung von Argumentationskompetenzen um keinen Selbstzweck handelt, sondern dass Lernende vor dem Hintergrund der erworbenen Fähigkeiten und Kenntnisse zu einer fundierten Meinungsbildung befähigt werden sollen. In diesem Artikel argumentiere ich vor dem Hintergrund neuerer Ergebnisse der erkenntnistheoretischen Forschung dafür, dass das soeben skizzierte Bild jedoch einer grundlegenden Ergänzung bedarf, (...) da im spezifischen Kontext des Philosophie- und Ethikunterrichts nicht die Bildung, sondern vielmehr die Aufgabe eines eigenen Urteils das epistemisch wünschenswerte Ergebnis darstellt. (shrink)

In dem vorliegenden Beitrag möchte ich an aktuelle argumentationsdidaktische Überlegungen anknüpfen und einen spezifischen Aspekt genauer untersuchen, der von der philosophiedidaktischen Forschung bisher ein Stück weit vernachlässigt worden ist. Dieser Aspekt betrifft die Vermittlung sogenannter argumentativer Metakompetenzen, worunter ich grob gesprochen Fähigkeiten des angemessenen Gebrauchs bzw. der verantwortungsvollen Regulation von argumentativen Kompetenzen verstehe. Die grundlegende Idee ist in diesem Zusammenhang, dass die Ausbildung basaler argumentativer Fähigkeiten zwar grundsätzlich durchaus wichtig und wünschenswert ist, dass aber gleichzeitig ein Einsatz dieser Fähigkeiten in (...) unterschiedlichen Situationen ganz unterschiedliche Funktionen erfüllt. Dementsprechend müssen Lernende nicht nur mit argumentativen Kompetenzen ausgestattet, sondern darüber hinaus auch zu einem reflektierten und situativ angemessenen Gebrauch dieser Kompetenzen befähigt werden. (shrink)

The files that have just recently been made available from Roman archives make it possible to shed new light on and relativize the often asserted,,Pope's silence." It can be seen, that there was no agreement within the Vatican on how to deal with National Socialism. Recent publications have constructed an antagonism between Cardinal Secretary Eugenio Pacelli and Alois Hudal, the politically active principal of the Collegio Santa Maria dell'Anima and supposedly a representative of,appeasement'. However, it can be shown that both (...) men initially agreed in principle with their assessment of National Socialism, even though they pursued different strategies. Hudal insisted on the public denunciation of National Socialism, on a clear positioning of the school, yet without success. Pacelli, a diplomat by training, was the one who thwarted nearly all of the Vatican's public proclamations against National Socialism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are significant instances of educational injustice in the context of philosophy teaching that can be effectively reduced by an increased implementation of digital technologies. More specifically, I show that there are good reasons to believe that testimonial injustices constitute serious instances of educational injustice that will frequently occur in philosophy classes. Using digital tools to anonymize student contributions opens up a promising way of dealing with these injustices. If convincing, my arguments give reason (...) to perceive epistemic injustices in educational settings as a serious threat to educational justice and to reconsider the implications of increased digitalization for issues of educational justice. (shrink)

While the impact of norms on post-conflict statebuilding operations has been well-explored in the literature, the ways in which the same normative frameworks affect the exit practices of such operations has so far remained unaddressed. To fill this gap, this paper examines the impact of the liberal-democratic norms governing statebuilding operations on the timing and process of exit of post-conflict international transitional administrations. To that end, it first examines the concept of exit, arguing that exit is best considered as a (...) process rather than an event. The second section outlines the normative framework that has shaped postconflict statebuilding activities since the end of the cold war, and proposes three ways in which norms can affect exit: first, that norms act as blueprints for statebuilding and can thereby shape benchmarks for exit; second, that norms create “zones of permissibility” that explicitly commit statebuilders to a transitional presence and make exit central to the legitimacy of statebuilding operations; and third, that local actors strategically use norms, in particular those of self-determination and the taboo of permanent control of a territory, to push for an early exit of statebuilding operations. The third section explores both the scope and limitations of the three functions of norms with regard to exit in the context of a brief case study of UNMIK's exit from Kosovo. The article concludes with some observations about the impact of the findings for exit strategies of international actors from statebuilding operations. (shrink)

Toleranz – eine Haltung, die in westlichen Gesellschaften wie kaum eine andere mit Nachdruck gefordert und mit Vehemenz verteidigt wird. Insbesondere eine tolerante Haltung gegenüber fremden Ansichten, Standpunkten und Überzeugungen wird von vielen als unverzichtbare Bedingung für das Gelingen eines demokratischen Miteinanders angesehen. Gleichzeitig wird kontrovers diskutiert, wo eigentlich die Grenzen einer toleranten Pluralität verschiedener Meinungen gezogen werden sollen. Welche Ansichten sind noch tolerabel, und welche nicht? Mit Blick auf aktuelle gesellschaftliche Diskurse und vor dem Hintergrund umfassender Kenntnisse der philosophischen (...) Toleranzforschung überprüft Dominik Balg kontrovers diskutierte Minderheitenpositionen auf ihre Tolerierbarkeit und entwickelt vor diesem Hintergrund einen klaren Kriterienkatalog, mit Hilfe dessen sich die Grenzen einer toleranten Haltung sinnvoll ziehen lassen. Darüber hinaus widmet er sich der Frage, was eigentlich jenseits unserer Toleranzgrenzen liegen sollte und wie man verantwortungsvoll mit Positionen umgehen kann, die nicht mehr tolerabel sind. (shrink)

The practice of early modern natural history depended on the collective collecting activities of a great variety of people. Among them, artisans played a major role in acquiring and distributing knowledge about the natural world and they contributed significantly to the scholarly labour in natural history. This distributed labour was both acknowledged by contemporaries as well as hidden from sight, reflecting the period′s dominant norms for class and gender. By combining an interpretation of the visual representation of labour in European (...) insect studies with an examination of written sources about natural history practices from about 1680 to 1810, this article decodes the often‐codified frontispieces and other more symbolic illustrations to offer new insights into the labour of natural history. Those who identified as scholars and artisans (or both) conceptualised their own intellectual and practical engagement with natural history within the semantic field of work. Some seemed to have even envisioned a new social role for academics as well as artisans. This article analyses the diversity of the “productive forces” in insect studies as they changed over time and it reconstructs what I will call the social imaginaries of participation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 22 Heft: 2 Seiten: 456-461.